Album Review: Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me

Reviewing the new Joanna Newsom record mere days after its release feels like a self-defeating task.  While all music writing is essentially various attempts to express the inherently inexpressible (and you can either fail well or badly), the sheer size, scope and intricacy of Have One On Me guarantees failure – at this stage, fans, musicians and critics are still just listening; there should be no writing – I should probably stop here. This is an album that unwittingly acts as a retort to the people who bemoan the speed at which music is consumed nowadays – it’s a triple album, composed largely on a harp, and the second track is an eleven minute song about a daddy long legs. You can’t blog Have One On Me; you can’t cherry-pick the singles and delete the rest. Welcome back, Joanna Newsom.

It’s been four years since Joanna Newsom released her last album – at the time, Ys was an enormous leap forward in song-writing, musicianship and ambition from her debut, 2004’s The Milk Eyed Mender, but now it feels kind of ordinary. One disc? Six songs? Pah - Newsom’s stepped it up another couple of notches this time around, and taken as a whole, Have One On Me combines the simple, intimate moments of The Milk Eyed Mender with the grandiose storytelling of Ys. That’s the wide lense, sweeping view of this album though – look closer, at a particular side or song, and the complexities of Have One On Me become glaringly apparent.

And this is how the album works, or how it seems to work to me at least – it overwhelms at first, but it slowly reveals its human side – its charms, its jokes, its moments of unexpected clarity – in little flashes initially, like holes appearing in this grand structure that gradually widen over time to let you in and see everything clearly, from the inside. ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ is one of these moments – it’s lyrics could be read off the page like a poem, resonant as they with humour and affection, but they become even more poignant in the exquisitely arranged and paced song (all too often lyrics that look good on a page sound awful in song, and vice versa – Joanna Newsom is one of only a few musicians who get this balance right, along with Joni Mitchell or Nick Cave).

It is these moments that keep you coming back to this record at this early stage, as the songs still continue to take shape. There’s the section towards the end of ‘Baby Birch’ on the album’s first disc for example – the song builds for six and half minutes, punctuated sparingly with electric guitar and percussion before finally bursting open, where Newsom throws in the strange image of a skinned rabbit; the way she turns the title of ‘In California’ into a sequence of vocal ticks and noises, in stark contrast to the sublime string arrangement that undercuts the song; the understated power of ‘Esme’, with just her voice and harp, as it used to be; the way the bluster of ‘Does Not Suffice’ fades fittingly into an echo and a drone.

As daunting as it may seem at first, Have One On Me is difficult to shake off. The size of its ambition and running time slowly give way to a simple humanity at its heart, embellished with moments of poetic truth, great humour and bitter sadness. As 2010 progresses, Joanna Newsom’s album will demand and provoke much discussion, but Have One On Me is a record that ultimately rewards those who listen, rather than talk.